If you watched the Monday Morning Beef this week - you'll know that Jules Vasquez slammed the Minister of Agriculture with responsibility for price controls, Jose Mai for not announcing the increase in bread prices.
Well, when the two met up today at another event, Mai took it on the chin; he said, "my bad":
Jules Vasquez:
"Bread? Why no public announcement, Minister?"
Jose Mai, Minister of Agriculture
"JULES, I believe that the ministry had made an announcement. I was really made to understand that, it was gazetted, I think. But I believe that, yes. An announcement that's saying you know what? The price of bread now has moved from so to so, so. So you are right in that. We erred in that statement. But nevertheless, Jules, that doesn't take away the costs of bread, of everything has gone up. And we were we were, look, that matter went to Cabinet a number of times, right. And many of the ministers were worried, everybody's worried about the high cost, even me. But when the bread makers showed us their cost, man how is it at that you will survive at this price?"
"Now, they wanted a $0.75 increase. Right? And we said that cannot be because we were, we were already subsidizing $0.25. So we said, no, we are prepared to go $0.10 above that. We went to, $0.35. But they didn't implement it until a while because they were waiting for us maybe to bend and twist and say, well, yeah, we will give you 70 cents but that could not be the agreement because Cabinet has said, listen, we're not prepared to go more than $0.35."
Jules Vasquez:
"Now, these bakers are still saying and, justifiably, you know the numbers, that they want more."
Jose Mai, Minister of Agriculture
"That is not something that will happen right now. Not right now, Jules."
Jules Vasquez:
"Why didn't you make a minister's statement about it on Thursday? You had every opportunity."
"On the on the increase in the price of bread."
Jose Mai, Minister of Agriculture
"I didn't think it was necessary at the time."
Jules Vasquez:
"How can it not be necessary?"
Jose Mai, Minister of Agriculture
"Until you made it public."
(Laughs)
Jules Vasquez:
"But I'm saying it was imminent, right? Like you could just make a minister's statement."
Jose Mai, Minister of Agriculture
"It slipped me. I didn't think about it, I thought, to be honest, I thought it was implemented already, until I saw the news, I said, what? What's going on here? And then Jules made it public. No, but I think, Jules, yeah, we should have made a statement. Right? It did happen. To me, it's a learning experience. And we're going to do the, we going to correct that next time. We can't make that same blunder, right?"
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